Visualizing pattern-welded steel has always been intriguing to me. At the forge, I end up layering different kinds of steels by varying carbon-content, nickel or phosphorous but ultimately don't know how the patterns will look until everything is forged, heat-treated, polished and etched. Using tools from the visual-effects industry, to be specific SideFX's Houdini, I have started exploring different ways of visualizing pattern-development. Here is a very early experiment: